Messaging systems are in wide use for maintaining communication between people, such as employees of a business entity and/or clients and vendors thereof. For example, messaging systems, in which a server or number of servers are deployed, coupled to information communication links, and typically having operator terminals coupled thereto, are in widespread use by business entities of all sizes. Such messaging systems may comprise electronic mail servers, as may operate upon one or more vendor platforms such as MICROSOFT EXCHANGE, NOVELL GROUPWISE, LOTUS NOTES, etcetera, coupled to various networks, such as local area networks (LANs), metropolitan area networks (MANs), wide area networks (WANs), intranets, the Internet, the public switched telephone network (PSTN), wireless networks, cable transmission systems, and/or the like, to facilitate information communication between other systems, servers, and/or access terminals. Additionally or alternatively, such messaging systems may comprise telephony systems, such as voice mail systems (VMSs), automated voice response (AVR) units, etcetera, coupled to one or more of the above mentioned networks to facilitate information communication between other systems, servers, and/or operator terminals.
Such messaging systems may comprise a relatively simple configuration, such as a single server system or relatively few servers (e.g. on the order of 10 servers disposed at a same physical location), providing messaging services for a few users (e.g. on the order of tens or hundreds of users). Alternatively, messaging systems may comprise a relatively complex configuration, such as many servers (e.g. on the order of 100 servers disposed throughout a city, state, region, country, or even the world) providing messaging services for a large number of users (e.g. on the order of thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users). Of course, such messaging systems may comprise any level of complexity between the aforementioned relatively simple and relatively complex configurations.
Providing management of messaging systems may present a number of problems, both technological and business related. For example, an agent-based model has been employed in the past, wherein software (an agent) is run on many or each server of the messaging system to collect data from each of these servers and transmit that data to a central system, when it has been attempted to collect data for management of a messaging system. In such a solution agents must be installed to each such server and properly configured for the corresponding server configuration. Thereafter, the agents must be individually maintained, such as to be upgraded to correspond to a server software upgrade, to be reconfigured to alter the type of data collected and/or how the data is reported, and the like. In a smaller environment, such as where 10 servers are deployed at a same location, installation and management of such agents may be feasible.
However, in an environment with hundreds of servers, such as may be deployed at a business entity's locations throughout the globe, installing and managing such agents becomes less feasible, and quite nearly impossible. For example, each of the hundreds of agents running on the hundreds of servers must typically each be kept up to date running the latest software, so as a vendor releases a new software agent it must be installed on the corresponding servers. This not only requires the time to install the agent software on each of the geographically diverse servers, but also the time to configure and confirm proper operation of the new agents.
Moreover, there is a natural aversion by information technology personnel and/or information technology companies to installing anything from any vendor on their production systems. In order to increase system stability, reliability, performance, predictability, etcetera, information technology professionals typically strive to keep important information technology systems as clean as possible. Accordingly, there is a reluctance to introducing such agents to the servers, or other systems, of the aforementioned messaging systems, in addition to the above mentioned logistical issues with respect to installation and maintenance of these components.
Even where one has acquiesced to the above disadvantages associated with the deployment of agents at the servers of a complex messaging system, further challenges are associated with their use in management data collection. Complex messaging systems are often characterized by having a large number of servers that are geographically distributed, such as throughout the world, and connected by a variety of network links which are often relatively low bandwidth and/or providing somewhat intermittent or unreliable links. Accordingly, a problem with respect to managing or collecting data from such a system is that, wherever a management system is disposed to try and collect data from the agents, the management system is completely at the whim of the network links and the relatively limited functionality of the agents. For example, data from such agents may be lost and/or the agents cease to function properly when links with a management system collecting the data fail. Moreover, in such a complex messaging system the management system in such an agent implementation typically must pull from many servers, increasing the complexity of the management system itself and/or degrading the performance thereof.
It should be appreciated that, in such a complex messaging environment, all the servers or other sources of management data are unlikely to be configured similarly and/or provide homogeneous functionality. For example, messaging system servers may be running different messaging software, perhaps from different vendors and/or operating upon disparate processor platforms or operating systems. It is not uncommon to encounter a messaging environment which includes a MICROSOFT product, such as EXCHANGE, to provide a mail server while a RESEARCH IN MOTION (RIM) product provides a wireless interface and/or another vendor's product provides anti-virus functionality, any or all of which may be operable upon various servers of a messaging environment. The way in which data is collected, the type and format of raw data collected, timing with respect to the availability of data, etcetera may be affected by these messaging environment server configuration aspects. Accordingly, in addition to providing the appropriate agents capable of collecting desired data being difficult, providing a management system capable of accommodating the variety of raw data provided and the various ways in which it is likely to be presented is itself difficult.
Additionally, the volume of raw data provided by agents, and therefore collected by a management system, in such an implementation is problematic. For example, the rate at which raw data is provided to a management system by such agents and the volume of raw data which must be processed, stored, and managed in association with a complex messaging system is great. According to a typical agent/management system implementation the personnel managing this collected data must create processes to backup the data, purge the data, consolidate or roll up the data, turn the raw data into useful information and do this on an ongoing basis and in a manner which accommodates the rate at which data is collected and the volume of data collected.
Historically, even where the above described agent/management system has been implemented, it is very difficult for large companies or other entities using relatively complex messaging systems to get a unified view across their entire environment, such as may include a number of servers, a number of geographic locations, and/or a number of vendor's products. For example, there has been no effective way to distill the large amount of data from disparate servers into a unified view of the messaging system. Moreover, there typically has not been the processing infrastructure and number of skilled personnel devoted to the task of massaging collected raw data into a unified view of the messaging system. However, such a unified view of a messaging system may be helpful in order to compare metrics in one region to another, to do balancing, or to do company-wide capacity planning. For example, although mail administrators may be satisfied with a fragmented view of the messaging system, providing information with respect to servers in their charge, at a higher administration level, such as at the level of a CIO of an organization, the issues and concerns are more global with respect to the entity's messaging system.
Moreover, it may be desirable at a high level administration level to have information with respect to the operation of the messaging system as compared to industry-wide norms or other external or internal benchmarking comparisons. However, there is nothing in place today which will give such comparative information.